How the Central Coast Council's Property Register Ended Up Full of Duplicate Images — and What It Costs Ratepayers

Central Coast Council is working through a backlog of duplicate and mismatched images embedded across its digital property and asset register, a problem that officers have traced back to the chaotic period between 2020 and 2022 when the organisation was under state-appointed administration. The duplication issue — which spans council-owned properties from Gosford's Mann Street precinct through to community facilities as far north as Wyong — has made routine tasks like heritage assessments, development application processing and infrastructure audits slower and more error-prone than they should be.

The timing matters. Council is now trying to move quickly on the Gosford CBD renewal framework, and accurate, clean asset data underpins almost every planning decision in that corridor. When a property file contains three versions of the same facade photograph, all tagged with different metadata, planners cannot be certain which image reflects the current state of a site. That is not a trivial inconvenience when millions of dollars in development decisions rest on the record.

How the Mess Was Made

The duplication problem did not appear overnight. It grew through a series of decisions — some deliberate, some by default — across nearly a decade of organisational upheaval on the Central Coast.

The former Gosford City Council and Wyong Shire Council merged in May 2016 to form Central Coast Council. Each legacy organisation ran a different geographic information system, with different image-naming conventions, different folder hierarchies and different staff practices around uploading site photographs. When the two datasets were merged into a single platform, thousands of records ended up with images imported from both legacy systems. Nobody was assigned to reconcile them at the time.

The administration period that began in October 2020, after a financial crisis left Council unable to pay its workers, compounded the issue. According to the NSW Government's subsequent review of the administration, Council's operational capacity contracted sharply across that period. Routine data hygiene tasks — including regular audits of asset registers — were deferred as staff focused on keeping core services running and the organisation solvent. By the time elected councillors returned in December 2021, the register had grown messier still, with images uploaded during the administration carrying yet another set of naming conventions introduced by interim management.

A further layer arrived in 2023, when Council migrated parts of its system to a cloud-based platform. Automated import tools pulled across files without filtering for duplicates, effectively locking in the problem at scale.

What a Fix Actually Involves

Replacing duplicate images in a local government asset register is not simply a matter of deleting old files. Each image is typically linked to at least one database record — a lot number, a DA reference, an infrastructure inspection report — and deleting an image without first remapping those links can orphan records entirely, creating a different category of error. Council's geographic information team, based at the Gosford administration offices on Wyong Road, has been working through a triage process that identifies which duplicate is the most recent, which carries the correct geo-tag, and whether any linked records need to be updated before the older versions are archived.

The practical consequences for residents are real. Gosford's Mann Street and the surrounding Kibble Park precinct are at the centre of several live development applications. Delays in verifying site records against clean imagery add days to assessment timelines. On the Warnervale and Hamlyn Terrace growth corridors in the north, infrastructure teams rely on the same register to schedule road and drainage inspections — errors there carry safety implications, not just administrative ones.

Council has not publicly costed the full remediation program, and no timeline for completion has been announced. What is known is that the state government's 2022 financial recovery plan for Council, which set strict conditions on spending through to 2025, left little room to invest in data infrastructure during the most critical years. The result is a problem inherited by the current administration that is unglamorous, largely invisible to the public, and genuinely difficult to fix quickly.

For ratepayers, the practical advice is straightforward: if you have a development application, heritage query or infrastructure concern involving a Council-owned site, ask your planner or contact officer to confirm that the property imagery on file is current. It is a reasonable question. Right now, the answer is not always as certain as it should be.